Nice barrage of reviews there.
I just don't get what's appealing about Dark X-Men, or how it makes any sense to anyone if you're not reading it as strictly camp.
Namor wearing an X on his belt? Really?
Given that Marvel have at this point set up practically every hero against Norman, as mentioned in the HoA podcasts, and now are showing the Cabal/Dark Illuminati turning on Norman too, how is this storyline supposed to last until December?
Surely it's going to require a lot of contrivances to explain why someone hasn't simply topped Norman by then.
I don't understand the 'nothing happened' criticism people are giving Messiah War. Were you really expecting much to happen? It was only a two-title crossover and obviously just filling in time til Dark Reign is done and they can actually do something more with Hope. But we still got Apocalypse and Elixir knowing 'what' Hope is, a decent story with a little character development all round, Futurepool, Bishop losing his time travel and Cable getting completely fucked.
Apart from the fact that I'm increasingly tired of Dark Reign, I like most of the Dark X-Men team. It's actually got three heroes, albeit oddballs, in the shape of Cloak & Dagger and Weapon Omega, and a nice retro touch in Mimic. There's a nice irony in Norman Osbourne using similar tactics to control Mystique as Xavier did in the past (her solo series). It's a lot more shades of grey than the over-the-top Dark Avengers.
So is Giuseppe Camuncoli drawing Wolverine and Hellblazer simultaneously?
And not that I particularly enjoy his style, but I thought the art in Wolverine was better than what he's doing with Constantine, which just looks improvised and washed out.
Bishop didn't lose his time travel, just his forearm. As a fringe crossover I guess this was fine, but I think the one-shot signals that readers should expect some significant development. That definitely didn't happen.
I'm just surprised that the T-O virus that Cable lost in Cable & Deadpool, which resulted in his power loss to a degree (a big deal in his current title), magically returned without explanation in Cable 16.
In the _X-Men Forever_, I bet that Wolverine skeleton is going to turn out to be the one from Limbo -- remember S'ym snapping off a claw from it, back in vol. 1 #160?
Messiah War was made up of 10 separate issues. I really don't think it's asking too much for a plotline to move at all in 10 issues.
And I'm rather surprised to see Paul compliment Gulacy's art, given his penchant for drawing Hope as a child with a human head. There are a few panels that look positively creepy.
Once again, you hit the nail in the head about the post-M Day status quo undermining the writers' efforts. As I read that riot scene featuring a bunch of mutants I assume had never appeared before, I couldn't help wondering how there could be so many of them in San Francisco, when there are supposed to be less than 200 mutants on the whole planet.
I would imagine that, even if the writers and editors want to reverse the Decimation (and some of them must), they're prevented from doing so by a top-down edict.
Oh JD, I think you haven't realized yet that everything out of C&D was ignored by the other writers. A damn shame, that's what it was.
One thing annoyed me about X-Men Forever. The story falls over itself to say there's nothing to ID Wolverine, nothing left but his skeleton. The two times we see the body though, it still has a full head of hair, and sideburns.
Astonishing Tales - 3 out of 4 stories were six parters, so I always presumed this was a six part series. I expect they'll start with a new #1 next time they have a backlog of website stuff to print.
Cable - the idea of anyone caring about X-Force is baffling. Presumably after this Hope will travel back to the early 21st century and write a lot of irate fan letters about Doop.
I was a little surprised by the fact that Ka-Zar and Deadpool, who teamed up in the last couple of issues of C&D, don't appear to recognise each other at all.
Ah, I knew I'd read a Deadpool/Ka-Zar team up reasonably recently, that's the one.
Daniel Way said in a recent interview that he laid out the story/plot and Marjorie Liu put the words to it. That's probably why the book read better than something that had Way's name on the cover.
And what's the over/under on when Hitch will have to call in help to finish 'Reborn'? On the large assumption that it will ship without delays, I'd go for 2.5 issues given he probably wait straight into this from 'Fantastic Four' with little or no break. It's a pity that Steve Epting is busy with 'Marvels Project' and Mike Perkins is away doing Steven King stuff. They should have just let Butch Guice do both the pencils & inks on 'Reborn' to be honest. I particularly enjoyed his work on 'Ultimate Origins' (which annoyingly looks to have been bit of a waste of money) and the odd issue of 'Iron Man' (during the Knaufs severely underrated run).
to Hugo.
Camuncoli is only doing layouts for Hellblazer, Landini finishes.
I was a bit disappointed after reading Batman & Robin #2, it all felt too predictible. I also hope Morrison brings back Anarky.
"And who wouldn't want a Wolverine series drawn by Gurihiru? They could call it Adorable Wolverine."
Wonderful.
@Thiago FLS
198 was the number of the CONFIRMED remaining mutants. The way i understood it, there were much more than 198, we just hadn't read about them yet.
@P. O'B.
Why do you assume that there were only mutants on the San Fran side of the riots? It seems to me that most SF stood up for the mutants and they were there with them.
BTW why does cable #16 look like some pages were drawn by a different artist than the rest?
LeoCrow, that's called fill-in artists. Most of the time they aren't even credited.
Marvel Divas was just terrible clichéd rubbish, sub-Sex and the City baws (in the sense that is was basically a complete ripoff of Sex and the City, aimed at an audience of absolutely no-one).
The art, however, was fantastic. What a waste.
I haven't been reading Utopia, but can't the problem also be fixed simply by claiming that depowered mutants are also involved.
As for Hope being a menace or a savior, I'm running with the idea that Cable simply documents here coming of age and try and enjoy the ride...
Marvel Divas also had that really stupid line by Monica about helping out in New Orleans after Katrina when all the white people ran away or something, and it was a really stupid thing to write much less believe.
Having not read Reborn #1, and going by what has been posted here and other places, is that it is actually current era Steve sent back in time to relive his war time? Or is it rather that they were trying to pull 40's Cap through time to the present?
I wish they would hurry up and reverse M-Day, get the mutant numbers back up (maybe not to pre-M-Day levels, but something more workable) and get back to defined X-teams. This set up where characters wander in and out of the team leaves little time or space for any real development for them.
And considering that we seem to be revisiting a lot of old 90's characters and concepts, I'm not at all surprised by the Messiah crossover doing very little to move the story forward. The X-crossovers of the 90's were all about getting everybody together, making a lot of noise, and ending up right where you were at the beginning.
To expand on a point LeoCrow made, in addition to however many mutant are in San Francisco and the nonmutant sympathizers that are supporting them for human rights reasons (if nothing else you have to figure a large portion of the city's gay population would be alarmed by the "slippery slope" potential of a proposal to regulate the sex lives of people who don't fit a conservative viewpoint of "normal" even if they don't support mutant rights specifically) they've also established that a lot of former mutants who lost their powers on M-Day still self-identify as mutants and moved to San Francisco, and that some of them retained physical abnomalities that make them look inhuman when they lost their powers.
@LeoCrow:
Marvel kept changing what "198" meant. The first I recall, it was described as an actual list in the Marvel offices for the 198 named mutants that would retain their powers (with some extras sneaking past for various story reasons). Then it was an in-universe list of the 198 known mutants. Then it became simply one incarnation of a growing list as more and more post-M-Day mutants were (re-)confirmed.
None of the books seemed particularly consistent over the matter. Some writers used (and would continue to use) 198 as a hard number, while others implied the real number was higher.
Just like Marvel couldn't make up its mind over whether 10% or 1% of the population retained mutant status, with different writers using different values. Not that either percentage was in any way reconcilable with the simultaneous idea that only 200-300 mutants were left versus the pre-M-Day mutant count.
Mind, Marvel couldn't even be bothered to come up with one official description of just what M-Day did, considering different writers kept presenting contradictory explanations.
"Having not read Reborn #1, and going by what has been posted here and other places, is that it is actually current era Steve sent back in time to relive his war time? Or is it rather that they were trying to pull 40's Cap through time to the present?"
It's the current Cap; he's reliving various experiences in his past.
No mention of the Rictor/Shatterstar snog?
The end of W:WX 3 bugged me. Logan rips the dudes eye out and places a tracker in it, then on the last page we see the guys eye hanging on a tree. Great visual aside, I thought it kind of sucked the momentum from the story. Just gave me the feeling of "tune in next week to see Logan wandering aimlessly around the jungle."
And for that matter, why in God's name is Logan using a tracking device anyway? He's consistently been shown over the years as having incredible tracking skills thanks to his mutant powers. Couldn't he just let the dude go and follow him by scent?
"I don't understand the 'nothing happened' criticism people are giving Messiah War."
It's a crossover and a sequel to a major event. One just assumes this is going to forward the story a bit more than it did, not just be 7 (however entertaining) issues of punchy-punchy.
I also have to say I'm enjoying Utopia thus far and they've actually sold me on the idea of the Dark X-men squad. This does not mean that we need another title/mini series, though.
Marvel have been hopelessly inconsistent about whether there are 198 mutants total, or merely 198 known mutants, but it makes no difference for the purposes of this story, because the ones in San Francisco are by definition among the 198 known mutants.
I don't recall any stories establishing that the ex-mutants have been moving to San Francisco. Where was that?
Hmmm, I seem to recall that coming up earlier in the run, actually. Couldn't pinpoint where though, and I very well may be wrong. But it does sound familiar.
This post was of zero help to anyone.
"I don't recall any stories establishing that the ex-mutants have been moving to San Francisco. Where was that?"
Scott put out a psychic message to all mutants that SF is a safehaven, the actual moving of depowered mutants to SF hasn't been shown anywhere as far as I know, maybe because it's not interesting enough.
It's a fairly weak explanation (stuff just happens in comics), but I can live with it and it can explain the presence of many mutants in SF (depowered or not). I was more bothered with Stryfe suddenly popping up out of nowhere in Messiah War (without any attempt at properly explaining it by the writers).
I any case, you're right about Marvel needing to reverse M-day, there aren't enough mutants (heroes and villains) to fill all the books they're publishing. I'm also hoping to see the Children of the Vault again (from Supernovas).
Re: 198 - that's never been intended to be the exact figure - there a one-shot profile book about the 198 and it didn't include loads of people who've subsequently emerged or re-emerged? Gyrich said "around 300".
The 198 Files only actually listed 134 mutants, so they always left themselves some room for manoeuvre. But since Cerebro was clearly shown still to be working, and the appearance of ANY new mutant has been clearly signalled as a very major event, it's minimal.
Wikipedia says that a total of 220 mutants have been shown to keep their powers after M-Day, but that includes characters who subsequently arrived from other dimensions (such as Magik and the Shadow-X team). And against that, over 30 of the mutants who kept their powers have died in later stories.
So we're still looking at numbers far, far, far below the point where any "subculture" metaphor becomes viable.
Oh, I agree that it's a ridiculously low amount, I was just quibbling on the 198 number.
It was established in Avengers Initiative that 300 mutants actually survived instead of 198.
Regarding Buffy, it sure felt like we all missed an issue, which I think is really because the otherwise talented Jane Espenson cannot write comics for her life, and seems to think that a little shorthand about things that happened offscreen is enough. She did this in her previous issue, too.
That said, I think you are right in that it's really hard to care about this series now.
What's really bothering me about Reborn is what it does to that issue of Thor where he contacts Steve from beyond the grave. The whole "floating in the timestream" thing just feels like it was made up well after the fact; something I didn't expect from Brubaker.
When they do reverse the decimation, I hope it's not a simple retcon, but rather just something simple like allowing mutants to reproduce again, and repowering another handful or giving some depowered mutants the means to be mutants again (there are already multiple possibilities to do that, just prevented by the higher-ups).
I can actually see Reborn #5 selling less than Cap #49 did - as an "event", it's a good cure for insomnia, and isn't getting the reviews to overcome that.
Wow. Twp comics released in the same week manage to ignore C&D completely. How on earth is it that people find these inferior incarnations of Cable and Deadpool so interesting?
What they really need to explain is whether mutants can have mutant children, whether some humans still carry some sort of recessive X-gene potential, whether it's inactive and can be reactivated. Because all the stories (the X-club, Humanity Now) deal with this yet no one has a clear explanation.
Well, they said from pretty much the start (certainly in HoM: Day After, possibly in HoM #
that the X-gene was gone from the ex-mutants, rather than suppressed.
But they've not always treated the ex-mutants as humans, full stop (even if you take out the still-visibly-altered ones - something muddied by New Warriors visually normalising Beak & Stacy X, after they'd initially been shown as somewhat different in Exiles & Generation M, and implying that they should all eventually revert to human...).
Son of M, for instance, treated ex-mutants use of the terrigen mist very differently from how Silent War (by the same writer) treated normal humans' use of the mists.
Whatever the post M-Day number is, we have to remember, that's how many mutants are left in the entire world, not just the US. Even if the total figure is 300 or even 400, it should means that there's only a few dozen mutants in the US.
I can't believe Shatterstar is gay. I mean, women love him! I didn't see that one coming.
HoM: Day After might have said the x-gene was gone. Endangered Species said the x-gene was suppressed. It was still present, it just didn't work anymore.
I cannot be certain, but I think Beast was still saying there were 198 mutants when the 300 claim was already established elsewhere. With Beast going nuts over the problem, and with the X-Men's resources, he should have had a fairly accurate count.
@Jeremy Henderson:
Some books have either implied or said that the US retained more of its mutants than the other countries of the world managed.
You've got the silly "people present for the end of HoM were protected" excuse, which would cover mostly US-located mutants. There was an Uncanny X-Men Colossus story where Russia wanted to know why the US kept so many of its mutants while Russia lost pretty much everyone except Omega Red.
Not to mention simply that in the Marvel universe, the US always appeared to have a larger number of mutants than anywhere else in the world.
I'd argue that also Monica Rambeau could be remotely classified as a "diva"; Any female who was a member of the Avengers in the eighties could. It was the decade of a thousand different Wasp costumes.
Yeah, reverse M-Day asap. Marvel seems to be spinning it's wheels, and none of the "Messiah" cross-overs seemed to offer a direction for the titles. And no, the X-men move to SF is not a direction.
IIRC, there was some mention of non-mutants arriving in the "Uncanny X-Men: Loveless" TPB, when Colossus broke up the human-smuggling ring.
My impression from the "Utopia" books was that most of the rioters are human protesters who are against forced sterilization of mutants on general principle, not because it directly affects them. It's not desperately clear, though.
They are trying to outlaw mutant breeding right? Chalk this idea as another tick in the "stories that would resonate better if it wasn't for M-day" column since mutants can't bloody breed as it is. Why did Hope make it through, anyway? Has that ever been established?
They don't know why. Although I recall that Beast said in (Endangered Species?) that mutants could breed, but the gene pool wouldn't be big enough to sustain the mutant race....which begs the question that's been bugging me to whole time since M-Day. Why would you want to purposely make mutants? I thought the X-men were all about how everyone was the same, we're all human? It seems a bit...racist, almost.
Goddamn. Anyone read Legacy yet? I wasn't giving a ratass about the whole San Fran riot, but goddamn. I don't know how Mike Carey makes me care, but the man does know how to bring his hand into the game. Now I want to see how all this is going to end.
Legacy's Utopia issue was great.
Hi Paul,
I've re-read the Astonishing X-Men Ghost Box arc and I was wondering if when you do the review you will clarify a couple things that bugged me:
1- So Emma Frost can turn her clothes to diamond as well , not just herself?
2- Why did one of Forge's artificial mutants (the one with little mouths all over his body) say that Forge was his enemy?
Thanks
I think the most exciting thing for me about the Utopia issue of Legacy was the reappearence of Ariel. Too exciting for words :D
Does anyone know who copied who, Gotham City Sirens or Marvel Divas? Do they have spies in each other's offices?
Well, the actual interiors have nothing in common whatsoever.
I doubt that that counts as copying each other: both companies seem to hype female starring comics with covers that...er, appeal to the base male customer.
My understanding from reading the issues was that Proposition X was forcing genetic testing on basically everyone, and those found to be carrying the X-gene in any form would then be forced to undergo chemical sterilization.
Seen in that light, is it not surprising that non-mutants would feel the need to protest Prop-X as well?
I'm (obviously) not a mutant, yet I can see how such a violation of civil liberties would be yet another progression down the slippery slope that post 9/11 America has been on.
And I'd definitely do my part to protest such a patently unconstitutional act.
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